


Memento Mori

by doctorate_in_realology



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Aang (Avatar)-centric, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, POV Aang (Avatar)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:41:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25619797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorate_in_realology/pseuds/doctorate_in_realology
Summary: Aang and Katara return to the Southern Air Temple to bury an old friend.
Relationships: Aang/Katara (Avatar)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 88





	Memento Mori

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the prompt "Heritage" of Day 5 of Kataang Week 2020.

If Aang were a more wrathful man, he might have thought of the absence of wind as something tantamount to a cosmic insult.

It was a strange silence. Eerie stillness had become so characteristic of the Southern Air Temple, the totality of his people’s destruction so absolute, that even the essence of their being, the air itself, felt stagnant and dead. The wind, in its vacancy, seemed to abide their absence. Part of him had expected, perhaps foolishly, to be met with a sense of hope upon returning to his old home instead of the typical melancholy that accompanied his thoughts.

He had given no insignificant consideration to the idea that it would it be better for the temples to stay this way. Faded necropoli left to stand as reminders forevermore of the tyranny of evil men. Aang turned and looked up at the alabaster-white façade of the Southern Air Temple’s principal tower, tall enough to rival the stone spires of the Patola Mountains around him. From tower to cenotaph, he thought, as he ruminated again on the temples’ fate, and again he came to the same conclusion that brought him here. As long as the temples remained empty, he could pretend that the airbenders that once roamed their lofty halls had achieved the ascension they once strived for. That they had gone not as smoke, but as stardust. Pretense, and the shallow comfort it afforded, would not honour his people’s memory.

So, he came home. To see it one last time before the change that would honour them came to fruition. To remind him of the power of greatness from small beginnings.

That didn’t make it any easier.

Perhaps it was the place he had chosen to meditate. Around him, the broken walls of an old storehouse, the cool blue of morning seeping over the edges of the dusty, crumbling crenellations between the battered chunks of stone atop the walls. At his feet, remains. He had entered the room an hour ago with a confidence that surprised him, given what he knew lay inside.

In a sense, this was where it all started. Where the fate of the airbenders became so soberingly real, and where his own destiny became solidified.

Gyatso’s eyeless stare met his own. Aang, sitting down directly across from him, closed his eyes and spoke.

“I guess I don’t really know where to start. I tried to get the words right before I got here, and I thought I did, but, looking at you now, it’s… Things are changing—have changed, a lot. As much as I wished you’d been there, I’m glad that you didn’t have to see the war. To see what the world looked like after a century without you. Without all the Air Nomads.

But they aren’t gone. Not completely. I made sure of it. And there’s a new group called the Air Acolytes that want to help me make sure it stays that way. Pretty soon, the temples are going to be full of people again, people that want to carry on our traditions. I don’t know that they’ll be able to bend, but you always said it isn’t the bending that makes an Air Nomad. They’re selfless and kind, thoughtful, respectful of the world around them, and they really want to learn. They’re everything an Air Nomad should be. They’re everything you were.

Oh, and I have a new family now! You’d really like them. Sokka and Toph, Suki and Zuko, and then there’s Katara. She’s… I love them all, a lot, but Katara’s special. You’d know it if you met her. Avatar Roku told me that friendships can transcend lifetimes, and Guru Pathik helped me realize that your guys’ love for me is reborn in new love, the kind Katara and I have. So, in a way—in a lot of ways, actually—you guys live on through her, too. I wish you could meet her. Maybe you’d be able to find the words for her that I can never seem to. Maybe the fact that I can’t find them is enough. Oh yeah, Roku and Pathik say hi, by the way.

But I’m rambling. I came to thank you, I guess. I wouldn’t be who I am without you, and… y’know, I hope I made you proud. Even half as proud as I am to say that I’m an Air Nomad. Even as half as proud as I am to say that I knew you. I love you, Gyatso.”

The seams of his eyelids glistened with unshed tears, and when he opened them, he was startled to find Momo sitting in front of him, big googly green eyes staring back at his. He must have been really out of it. It would have been reason enough to be surprised that he had not so much as heard Momo enter the room, for he was usually far more aware than that—his ruminations on Gyatso must have taken him deeper into the recesses of his mind than he thought.

But that was not what startled him. No, not even close. What shocked him was that for a fraction of a moment, a fleeting, transient instant in time as he transitioned back to the present from heavy thought on his old friend and the world he once knew; as he ruminated on what it looked like when the temple halls teemed with Air Nomads, and what they would look like again some time soon; as a living relic of it stood before him, tilting his head at quizzical angles and looking on with a stare of blithe vacancy—for a moment, the pretense was real. For a single, sundering moment, it was like nothing had changed at all.

Momo lifted his arms as Aang reached down to pick him up, and he tucked him to his chest, pressing his forehead to the fur between Momo’s parted ears. Momo nuzzled into him, happily chittering away, and from what Aang could tell he seemed unbothered by the tears wetting his fur. “Thanks, buddy,” he whispered, otherwise unable to voice the happiness he felt despite the longing he heard in his own voice. Momo trilled as if to say _no problem_ , and Aang laughed, kissing him on the forehead and ruffling his ears.

Another pair of arms laced around his neck from behind, and he felt her chin come to rest on his shoulder. Katara. He had not heard her enter either, and wondered how long she had been standing nearby.

Not that it mattered. He leaned his head against hers. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

For a time, that was all they said. They sat there, the three of them in a mass grave, cold and gaunt and grim. As macabre as it was, there did not seem to Aang anywhere else he needed to be, for he was at Katara’s side and she at his. “It’s enough,” she suddenly said.

“What is?”

“You said that maybe the fact that you can’t find the words is enough. It’s enough.”

He felt the tears, a tide of joy, rise to his face again. “You heard that, huh?”

“I heard all of it.” Just like he could now hear the trembling in her voice that matched his own.

Aang released Momo to let him clamber up to his shoulders, and he shifted away from Katara enough that he could look at her face, around which he cupped a hand, and again he was stunned. Not in the usual way he was when he saw her, but in the same way he had been astonished by that ephemeral feeling of familiarity mere moments ago.

In defiance of what he thought possible, she became yet more profound. “I can’t even begin to explain how happy I am that you’re here.”

She smiled, and pressed her lips to his. “I wouldn’t be anywhere else,” she said as they parted.

“I want to bury them,” he said. “All of them. Take them all to the mountains. Give them the proper Air Nomad rites. Even the Fire Nation soldiers.”

So they did. The ligaments between the bones were long lost to time, no more than the occasional clingings of porous dust, so the bodies had to be transported in piles of themselves. With great obeisance, they gathered each of the clattering bones and tatters and loaded them on Appa’s saddle in neat rows, reassembling the bodies one-by-one so as to keep together, keep whole what little was left of them. The saddle was barely big enough to fit them all, but there was an agreement unspoken between Aang and Katara that they should do nothing so vulgar as piling any one of the skeletons atop another to conserve room. Instead, the two of them tightened what distance they could between the remains by gently laying their arms over one another. That way, it was almost as if they were holding hands. A fate kinder than they deserved, these Fire Nation soldiers? Perhaps. But Aang was not given to such judgement, and there was no sense in the hollow vengeance that any other treatment would visit upon them.

Then came time to move Gyatso. The eventuality of it had been lingering in Aang’s mind all the while, but faced now with the prospect of actually doing it, he froze. Katara was outside, laying the last of the Fire Nation soldiers’ remains on Appa’s saddle, so he spoke only to himself. “I didn’t think it was going to be this hard.”

With slow, solemn reverence, he scooped up Gyatso’s remains, careful not to drop a piece of his old friend. His bones were a clutter in Aang’s arms, all disconnected. Guru Pathik flashed across his mind again, as much a taunt as a reminder. Indeed, Aang had laid out his grief before him those distantly few years ago and expelled it, only for it to now come crushing back. To say that it returned would be imprecise, however. For it to be called a return, it had to have departed in the first place. Sequestered, forgiven, no longer allowed to define him, but still inextricably a part of him. Nothing would change that. This was not a return, but a re-emergence.

As he exited the storehouse, he felt one of the bones slipping, and his arms were too full of the others to stop it.

It fell. Slipped out of the ragged, browned cloth, out of the ghostly jumble of remnants, out of his arms, and clacked against the flagstones, loud, deafening in the stillness and silence. Aang swallowed hard, angry, embarrassed, ashamed, and knelt to pick it up.

“Aang.” Katara hopped from Appa’s back.

Another fell as he rose after retrieving the first and he whimpered at the mercilessness of it. Each hollow impact echoed behind his eyes in tearful aches. He inspected the dropped remains for damage, praying that he found none and trying not to burst into tears when he did.

“Aang.” He was vaguely aware of Katara moving toward him.

He tried to pick up the second and another slipped from his arms. Then another. Then the rest. At first he tried to chase them as they came scattering out of his grip, bouncing across the stone, until he fell to his knees with the futility of it. He wanted to scream but could muster neither the words nor the will. An everted Gyatso lay around him. It was so quiet again after the echo of the dancing bones that his tears were audible when they hit the ground between his hands.

“Aang!”

Katara was around him in an instant. The air became stinging cold on his face in the trails on his cheeks. “I didn’t think it would be this hard,” he choked.

She pulled his head to her chest, just beneath her chin, and the two of them sat there in silence broken only by stifled sobs. Rocking, slowly.

“I’m sorry,” Aang said.

He felt tears on his scalp, and then a kiss to replace them. “Don’t be. I can’t imagine how hard this is for you.”

But she could. Nobody understood better than she did. Aang knew that. It was why he had considered asking her not to come, to let him do this on his own. As he sat there in her arms, surrounded by the bones of his past, he wondered how he might have made it through the day. “I wouldn’t be able to do this if you weren’t here.”

“I told you,” she wound her arms tighter around him, “I wouldn’t be anywhere else.”

The sites were kept separate. The Fire Nation soldiers were buried atop one mountain, Gyatso to be buried on another. As they had searched for a suitable place for the former, Aang tentatively pointed to one, but, remembering that the mountain was named Cloudrender, thought it inauspicious, and so he settled for another whose name he could not recall. Nameless, but untouched, unmarred by the iniquity of the very men who would be buried on its crown.

It was not a long ceremony. Aang and Katara laid out the remains, careful not to mix up the bones and keep each one with the body to which it was heir, and Aang bent tiny bulwarks around them, keeping the tops of the housings open so that the remains would still face the sky. Katara lit juniper incense, and the two of them stood solemn for a few quiet moments.

Content that the soldiers might find in death some of the peace they once destroyed, Aang and Katara returned to Appa’s saddle. There was far more room on it now, and Gyatso’s small remains looked smaller for it as they lay braced against its leather ridge. Momo sat before the bones, his usual curiosity supplanted by what looked to be contemplation. “Where would you like to take him?” Katara asked.

Aang scanned the mountains around them. Below, a bed of clouds that obscured the earth from sight, and in the high fog the temple in the distance looked all the more empty and ominous. It was a sight he had seen countless times before, and each time he had thought the temple the very picture of serenity. It did not seem so, now. Eventually, his mind refocusing, he spotted the peak he had in mind. “There. That’s where I want to bury Gyatso.”

Katara nodded as if in approval. “Does it have a name?”

Aang nodded back, saying nothing further for the moment. Nothing but a silent thank-you that Katara did not inquire further. It had a name, and it was a familiar one.

They flew to its peak. There, Aang bent an altar atop which he would lay Gyatso’s bones. With Katara’s help this time, he transported them there, and again she burned juniper incense.

She kissed his cheek, her hand warm on his shoulder as she did. “Take your time. I’ll go wait with Appa.”

“No,” Aang seized her hand, almost desperately. “Stay. Please.”

Katara made no effort to conceal the relief in her exhale and remained at his side, just behind him to his left.

Slowly, piece-by-piece, Aang assembled his grim puzzle, reanatomizing Gyatso on the stone surface of the altar. Gyatso’s lower half was reconstructed before Aang spoke. “We are as leaves,” he recited the old words as he placed the torso, “and the wind that drifts between them. As the stars,” now he placed the arms, “and the sky that lets us see them. Life, death,” finally, the head, “and the kindness that precedes them. We return to the harmony of ourselves,” Aang laid a palm on Gyatso’s forehead, “that which we made, and that for which we strived, and become one with all things.”

He sniffled, took a deep, calming breath, and his hand gently slid away. “So long, Gyatso.”

As always, Katara was there as he turned. A small smile decorated her face, one of consolation, sobriety, pride. She opened her arms, and Aang walked into that embrace. “That was beautiful, hon,” she said, words muffled by his closeness, the heat of her breath a bloom across his robed chest. “I’m so proud of you.”

The icy pine of juniper incense gave way to the cinnamon scent of her hair as her head tucked beneath his chin. How perfectly they fit into one another, he thought. How perfectly they belonged. Once more, he saw the temple cloaked in the morning fog, no longer looking empty, ominous, like a husk—simply peaceful. Not stagnant, simply still. He breathed. Just breathed. A gust of wind blew past him. The first he had felt that day.

He pulled away from Katara, only far enough and no further, to take her face in his hands, and thought that he had finally found the words. “I love you. Sublimely.”

They’d been said a thousand times, those first three words, but he hoped the circumstances imbued them with the poeticism that had long eluded him. Even as a red hue flushed her skin, Katara did not take her eyes from his. Instead, her lips parted in an immaculate, melting smile, one reserved solely for him. What a gift it all was.

They kissed, arms snaking around each other, eager but not tight, alacritous but not possessive. Relaxed enough that either of them could part whenever they wished, all to demonstrate to each other that they never would. It was their embrace. Her lips were sweet like cherry wine.

After some time they found themselves at the mountain’s edge, legs dangling over it as they looked out over the landscape of spires that sprang up around them. Sunlight turned the fog to an amber shroud, dappling the mountaintops with dewdrops of gold. “You asked if this mountain had a name like the others,” Aang broke their long, companionable silence.

Katara said nothing, merely turning to him in his periphery.

He sighed. “Gyatso named it himself. Aang’s Ascent.”

Somehow, he heard Katara go stiller, but only for a moment. She leaned her head on his shoulder, and laughed a little.

“What?” he asked.

“It’s a good name for a mountain, don’t you think? Almost like it gets more and more appropriate every second.”

“How so?”

She nestled closer against his side, and he laid an arm around her waist. “Well… The more things around it change, the more it stays the same. Thousands of years go by, it gets weathered and eroded, chipped away, but nothing is ever enough to change it. It’s still beautiful. Breathtaking and uncompromising even in the face of everything the world throws at it.

“That brings us to you.” He felt her squeeze his arm. “The Fire Nation takes everything from you. You wake up to a completely different world, one without your culture, your people, one that asks you to forsake them as it lays the burden of fixing it all at your feet. Over and over again it forces you to sacrifice, all while it asks you to save it from itself. And even after all the heartbreak, the loss, the agony, the rage… Even after all that, you don’t change. Just like the mountain. Here you are, tired, weathered, maybe even eroded a little—but the same. Still you. Uncompromising. Breathtaking. Beautiful.”

He thought he would weep. “Sometimes I wonder what I did to deserve you.”

She shrugged and closed her eyes. “You became a mountain.” 


End file.
